My 'true north' for change

For a while now, my whole life has been about change.  The kind of change that has kept me just slightly off-balance on a continual basis. As a small business owner, it’s a given that my life’s just a bit more risky and off-balance than most.  But 10 years ago heavy stuff began – purchase of a giant 100 year old building, birth of 3 children, two tenant bankruptcies, health issues.Through all of this I continually believed life would somehow even out, become more normal. I don’t know how and when I realized that turbulence in my life is normal (even at this scale.) But I did.Once I did reach that point, I began searching for a true north to help me weather the turbulence. I needed a means to explain or understand change – why sometimes it was joyful (births of babies) and other times it was painful (bankruptcy and broken ankle.)

Discovery: Types of Change

First, I found words for the types of change we all experience. Linda Ackerman (1986) defined three types of change: developmental, transitional, and transformational. To make this more understandable I put it on a continuum.By itself, this went a long way towards creating clarity for me.  This is how I understand it:

• Developmental changeSmall changes, incremental changes that I almost always initiate or direct to improve my life. Examples are a new hairstyle or cutting out sweets.
• Transitional changeMedium change that I often initiate, but not always, that alters my life landscape often for the better, but is relatively disruptive. Examples for me are babies, new tenants, layoffs, moving to a new house.
• Transformational changeBig change that significantly alters my life. Often this emerges from a series of changes or is radical and unexpected. Examples for me are buying a historic building at the same time I have my first child the day after 9/11 or having an infant with a heart condition. For other people it might be the sudden unexpected death of spouse or child, cancer, house burning down.

While immensely helpful, simply knowing about the types of change was incomplete for me.  It didn’t explain why my transitional changes often were considered transformational changes to all of my friends.

Discovery: Beliefs Make the Difference

I realized that what I believed and what my friends believed was what affected our experience of an event.  Every human being has a complex system of beliefs that is unique to them, and to understand this I see beliefs existing on a continuum from peripheral to core.And so, I created a second continuum. Peripheral beliefs are not personal or central to our existence, while core beliefs are directly related to our definition of self.

Success: My True North for Change

Now that I had these two pieces, I put it all together like this:When change starts pushing at our fundamental beliefs about ourselves and how the world works (or should work), that’s what makes it transformational. And that’s what makes it painful.So for example, if I believe the only way to really get my house clean is to use bleach and then find that my child is allergic to it, I’ll easily give up my bleach. There is no real threat to a core belief about myself so I’ll easily adjust my peripheral belief about cleaning and move on.However, changing to a great paying job that requires me to travel 4 or more days out of the week would make me miserable because it is seriously pushing on my beliefs about what makes a good mom – and being a good mom is central to who I am. It’s a whole lot harder to change my beliefs related to motherhood, so I’m not likely to be taking a traveling job anytime soon.

And a new model is born!

Now that I have this model it helps explain a whole lot for me: why some of the smallest things trigger such a huge response in people. The implications are astounding and you’ll hear more about how this relates to business and society in future posts.